ONLINE HARMS BILL

The Online Harms Bill is a legislative proposal to regulate, to an extent, companies allowing users to share or discover user-generated content or to interact with each other online. This includes social media platforms, file hosting sites, public discussion forums, messaging services and search engines.

The proposal sets up a dedicated regulator and places on relevant companies a duty of care towards their users, mandating them to have in place systems and controls aimed at keeping their users safe online, and comes as a response to public concerns about online safety.  Its aim is to mitigate the risk of illegal online content undermining individual rights and national security.

It tries to strike a balance between freedom of expression and the need to protect individuals and national security.  As such, it focuses on content that can cause harm to people or to national security – e.g. content containing hateful content (hate speech, cyber bullying etc.) and content created by hostile actors (foreign powers, terrorist groups, criminal gangs and the like).

The spread of illegal content can result in physical and psychological harm against people as well as in other criminal activities such as terrorist attacks and arms trade, as well as in interference with a country’s democratic process.

The proposal also appears to be the result of a shift in perspective towards considering the internet and social media as a national critical infrastructure.

Financial harm is not considered in this bill. Why is that? For example, the Crime Survey for England and Wales measure of cyber crime and the DCMS Cyber Security Breaches Survey data show a cost the UK Government of £3 billion per year.

Fraud is considered a “victimless crime” as nobody gets physically hurt by it.  However, the psychological harm that can be caused by fraud is undeniable.  Losing savings to a fraud can ruin a person’s life and have a huge psychological impact on them.  Financial harm can, in extreme cases, lead a person to take their own life.  How is that victimless?  The harm caused by fraud can be as severe as that caused by other illegal online behaviours and should not be ignored.

Including financial harm within the “harms” considered in the Online Harms Bill would have put the hurt caused by fraud at the same level as that caused by other unlawful online activities, recognising its potentially devastating effects on a person’s life.

From a regulatory point of view, this would have meant forcing relevant technology providers to consider fraud risk when setting up the systems and controls required by the proposed legislation.

The exclusion of financial harm from the proposed legislation means that the requirement is not there and therefore that relevant technology companies have no obligation to check content for fraud risk other than that dictated by their own reputational risk appetite.

However, it is never too late to start a dialogue and to take technology providers on a journey, collaborating with them in improving the online fraud landscape.

The truth is that, in order to really tackle fraud and its consequences, a cultural shift needs to happen.  We need to stop considering fraud a victimless crime and see it for what it really is – a hateful behaviour that deprives people of their future.

That the government is paying more attention to fraud, and allocating more resources to countering it, is a welcome sign that this cultural shift is starting.  We need to continue supporting this change.